Posts Tagged ‘Cost-Benefit Analysis’

If British reports are to be believed, the Grenfell Tower inferno in central London might have been averted for a cost of a mere $6,000 — or a little more than $100 for each of the 58 unfortunates who, on the best estimate available this weekend, perished in the disaster.

According to the London Daily Mail, when the tower was recently renovated, builders opted for a cladding material so inappropriate that it is rated “flammable” in Germany and its use in tall buildings in even lightly regulated America is banned. The attraction was a saving of a mere 10 percent. On the Mail’s numbers, that added up to a total saving compared to a safe material of £5,000 — equal to a little more than $6,000.

Such is the dystopia that deregulation, British-style, has wrought — a dystopia whose excesses are now finally coming to be widely recognized by voters and elected leaders alike.

This is neoliberalism in action. First you privatize a public service, as was done with public housing in Great Britain, because for-profit corporations are supposed to be intrinsically better able to make decisions than public bodies. Then you make decisions based on assumptions about profit-and-loss, because this is supposed to be objective and rational.

Also, you judge the worth of a human life based on that person’s financial net worth.

Thankfully, not everybody makes decisions on this basis. The brave firefighters who saved Grenfell Tower residents were motivated by a sense of duty, not a cost-benefit analysis. Yet firefighters, too, in the UK as well as the USA, are being weighed in the neoliberal balance and found wanting.